Harvest close to half done in North West region

Sep 19, 2022

Nearing the middle of September, producers in the North West region, including the Battlefords and Meadow Lake area, are reporting they have close to half their crop harvested now.

Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture crops extension specialist, Matthew Struthers, said the area is sitting at 47 per cent in the bin.

“That’s up from 28 per cent last week, and actually it’s well ahead of their five-year average of 27 per cent,” he said. “They started a little bit slow there, just due to the weather they were having. But now that it’s dried out and the crops have dried down they have made quick work of it.”

While there were a few challenges in parts, farmers are making the best of it. The expert said some of the grain is coming off a bit damp or tough, due to excess moisture. But producers are putting it in their dryers and aeration bins so they are able to store it properly.

Crop grades are looking good overall in the region. Yields are also strong where fields had sufficient rains in the growing period this year.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids